Over four decades ago, when I was living and working in the arctic, I observed more than one phenomenon that, at the time, I did not recognize as indicators of climate change.

I saw moose north of their commonly known range, but did not realize that moose had just recently arrived and were probably there because of melting permafrost and the recent expansion of Salix (willow) on Alaska’s North Slope. Nor did I connect my observations of thawing permafrost and collapsing ice lenses with changing climatic patterns.

However, as early as 1896, Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish Nobel Prize winning scientist, recognized that human activities and the burning of coal was already changing the earth’s atmosphere and energy balance. Using records of coal consumption, Arrhenius described the greenhouse effect and predicted how the human-induced impact of more carbon dioxide would affect temperatures. His calculations, as supported by data 120 years later, proved to be remarkably accurate. Recognizing the changes which were set in motion about 150 years before Arrhenius wrote the first paper about the greenhouse effect, scientists have begun to label the industrial revolution as the beginning of a new epoch; the Anthropocene, meaning a time when human activity is the primary driver of our climate and environmental changes.

Little attention, though, was paid to Arrhenius’ observations until President Lyndon B. Johnson, speaking before a joint session of Congress in 1965, stated that a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels had already “altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale.”

But, during Johnson’s time, scientists were not yet focused upon “tipping points.” Data suggests that, until recently, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide had not exceeded 300 parts per million at any time over at least the last 20 million years. However, by June 2018, carbon dioxide had exceeded 410 parts per million, with the rate of increase accelerating. And, unfortunately, there are now additional threats from methane, another greenhouse gas that is even far more potent than carbon dioxide. Methane releases from various sources, including melting permafrost and perhaps from underwater frozen methane hydrates, can exacerbate and further accelerate climate changes.

Over the past few decades, interested observers, such as myself, could have never anticipated the more recent models we are now seeing of coastal towns and cities, and even entire countries, inundated with seawater. But recently, scientists are learning more about tipping points and how rapidly impacts, which were previously believed would take hundreds or thousands of years, could perhaps easily occur within a matter of decades. Thus, a tipping point, such as methane releases from the circumpolar arctic, or something else unknown to us now, could trigger events that may lead to the planet becoming uninhabitable for life as we know it.

The balance of Earth’s desirable equilibrium temperature has already moved into a dangerous zone. In his graduate work, the astrophysicist Carl Sagan explored the process by which the surface of Venus had become an uninhabitable inferno, and quickly realized the greenhouse effect was true throughout the entire universe. Sagan explained that what had happened to Venus could also happen on earth within the foreseeable future. Less than an additional 4 degrees Celsius of warming could mean the end of human civilization. If warming stabilized at one degree less than that threshold, the Colorado River would shrink to a trickle, with most of the Southwest becoming uninhabitable.

In 2017, the brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking predicted that humans aren’t likely to persist on our planet for even another 1,000 years. Hawking feared that President Donald Trump’s redirection in environmental policies and protections would endanger the planet and make global warming irreversible, perhaps causing the Earth “to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid.”

Physics doesn’t care about politics, but voters and politicians would be wise to acknowledge and care about the laws of physics. Many politicians, from our small civic governments all the way up to the President, seem to be doing their best to make Hawking’s predictions come to fruition. With the emergence of “alternative facts” replacing science and math, and political leadership unwilling to recognize the reasons for — or effects of — climate change, what are the odds we can successfully confront the challenges now facing us in the Anthropocene?

Jack Gustafson, a CSU graduate, was a biologist for for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game for much of his career. In 2009 he moved to Grand Junction, where he has worked as a self-employed biologist doing field surveys in NW Colorado. He can be reached at nahabay@hotmail.com.

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